Unboxious

Anyone got the awful AI sub Amazon did? As far as I can tell it’s lost media.

Do you think Heavy Knight works as a so-bad-it’s-good title?

Finished the third season of Chihayafuru today. It was great! Chihayafuru is a sports/romance story about a girl who just wants to play karuta. Karuta is a simple game. A bunch of cards get laid on the floor between the two competitors. A poem is read, and the first player to touch the card with the corresponding poem gets rid of one of their cards. The first person to get rid of all of their cards wins. Sounds like it could get dull, but as with anything where humans are competing against one another it gets intense.

Pros:

• Insane main character. Only has a mind for karuta and breathing. TBH not super confident that she can even consistently remember to breathe.
• Fun supporting cast
• The art, voice acting, etc are all great.

Cons:

• The anime leaves off at a pretty reasonable spot, but it’s unfinished. Season 3 aired in 2019 though, so there’s still hope!
• You’ll find yourself wanting to play a card game with an incredibly high barrier to entry (memorize 100 classical Japanese poems!) which isn’t even that popular in Japan and which nobody you knows is likely to want to play.

It’s not often a protagonist actually gets into a relationship during a show’s run

It’s actually a lot more common now that it used to be. Perhaps this is selection bias, but the majority of the romance anime I’ve seen these past few years feature a relationship that starts either at the beginning of the show’s run or right in the middle (my personal favorite time for things to get real).

It goes further than that, he gave her an engagement ring! And not just a minor, but an elementary-schooler.

Image

Fun stuff; very in-character that Reigen has no idea how to do something as simple as screw something into the wall.

I wonder if it will follow a similar path to Vinland Saga, where the path to enlightenment will eventually lift the burden of the past.

Maybe. It’s not like the Mongols are gonna stop pillaging, but maybe her focus could be on helping those around her rather than enacting revenge on Mongol leadership. Of course if she did want to enact some revenge she’s in a great place to do it now.

I’m thinking Kaguya from Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Unlike most introverted protagonists, she actually tries, even if her fear and pride still cause things to advance at a slower pace than the characters might have preferred. But she tries, and her ridiculous plots are fun to watch unfold.

It’s not practical, but nothing is stopping you. I made a raid array of 1 internal SATA HDD + 1 external USB HDD of the same size once because I needed to store some data real quick before updating my NAS.

Also, with modern encoders you can fit a series on waaaaay less than half a terabyte. For example you can get the 14-episode 1st season of The Ramparts of Ice for 2.2GB. Obviously there are longer seasons than that, but we’re talking about less than 200MB per episode and with really good quality too!

Re:Zero is great but if you don’t want to watch the main character have a horrible time you probably are good to stop watching. It is definitely gonna keep happening more in the future.

Many anime viewers (understandably) complain about the results, but it’s certainly nice that amateur writers have a place to publish and read each others’ works. The normal pipeline there is that something will start as a web novel, and then if it’s really successful it’ll get picked up by a publisher like Kodansha to be sold as a light novel and then if that’s successful it’ll eventually get animated. I’m not certain how different the web novel and light novel usually are; my impression is not very! There is some editing that goes in though, and the light novels also have a bunch of included illustrations. This is both a good thing and a bad one. The web novel will usually have no art at all, just text. When those illustrations are made for the light novel adaptation, they’re locking in character designs that they’ll have to stick with later if those books ever get animated. But at the light novel stage it’s still relatively low-budget so the amount of talent and effort that goes into making those character designs usually (in my opinion) doesn’t measure up to the talent and effort that goes into making character designs for manga-original or anime-original stories. So in addition to a generic RPG fantasy world, you (often) end up with generic RPG fantasy character designs.

TBF large parts of Naruto would have benefited from quicker pacing. I expect they’ll go quite a bit further than that here though!

Regarding titles, a lot of anime end up with really long official titles because they originate from a Japanese web-novel site where due to the design of the site people have to distinguish their works by the title alone.

I love Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku o! but that’s a bit of a mouthful so I (along with everyone else) just call it KonoSuba.

Incidentally, this is probably related to the reason SailorFuzz suggested avoiding anime with long titles. Anime that originated from that site on average have more amateurish writing since it’s a site for self-publishing. I wouldn’t go so far as to discount everything there though; there have certainly been some good stories that originated from that site. In addition to KonoSuba I also really liked The Apothecary Diaries, Log Horizon, and Re:Zero for example. There are also plenty of great anime with longer titles that don’t originate from that site, such as Kaguya-sama: Love is War or Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

It’s not like isekai stories are inherently bad or anything, it’s just that there have been a few very very successful ones and so a lot of substandard stories get greenlit for animation in this genre because executives are desperate to recapture that lightning in a bottle. There were 59 stories released last year alone with the isekai tag on anilist. Most of them are slop that can barely be distinguished from one another.

One of the big problems that the genre has is that most of them take place in the same western RPG fantasy world. As Geoff from Mother’s Basement pointed out in his recent video, a lot of Japanese people were introduced to western fantasy through games like Wizardry rather than through book like The Fellowship of the Ring or The Wizard of Earthsea. As a result, the worlds of these isekai anime (almost) all feel very same-ish the way the worlds of those RPGs often feel very same-ish. When you watch an isekai anime, you’re not watching someone get sent to a mysterious world full of strange magical creatures and dangerous roads. You’re watching them get sent to go play Dragon Quest some more but in-person this time. There are exceptions of course; I’m quite fond of the world of Vision of Escaflowne for example, but the majority of these shows just feel exactly the same as all the other isekai slop out there because they can’t be bothered to do anything at all to even try to feel different.

Nice! I forgot to mention it because there are just too many great anime out there, but Mob Psycho is also one of my favorites.

Every sunday night (from my perspective in Mountain Time anyways) there’s a discussion thread posted to /c/anime where people talk about what they’re watching and whether they’re liking it. You can go there and post a comment or reply to someone else. Of course you can do the same in other threads as well, but I bring it up as a good place to start.

As for what to watch, there are a few ways to find stuff. One option is to just look at the highest rated stuff out there and just pick some random thing that looks interesting. Another option, especially if you want to keep up-to-date with stuff that’s being currently discussed, is to watch videos from channels like Mother’s Basement and Gigguk. Right now at the start of a new season a bunch of new shows are just starting to air, and so in a week or two both of those channels will have videos out pitching their favorites to viewers.

If you just want something to watch without needing to do any research here are my favorites:

• Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood for action/adventure
• Kaguya-sama: Love is War for romcom
• Redline for a sick movie about a deadly car-racing tournament on alien worlds
• LOOK BACK or Journal with Witch for something more emotional

It would be the cyberpunk thing to do.

No idea; I’m only caught up with the anime. Would that be a spoiler for me then?

People in Re:Zero are constantly commenting on how scary Subaru’s face looks, but he’s just a well-meaning dumbass.

WDYM? Is this not how she was in the manga?

I wonder how the “witch”-part will come into play as nothing is really hinting at any witchcraft so far.

No idea! Incidentally, if I had a nickel for every time there’s a really promising 2026 anime with an English title that referenced witches and a Japanese title that didn’t reference witches I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice.

Aww yeah can’t wait to see a whole new group of people confused by CLAMP’s writing!

At least we don’t have to wait too long for it!

It can be frustrating sometimes, but since I’m keeping up with dozens of manga right now there’s always something new for me to read.

Hope he gets back his memory. I am not keen on a Subaru which has no past hardship memories. IMHO it is what makes it who he really is!

I want him to get those memories back too, but I’m not sure I’m keen on him getting them back this way. Neither he nor anyone else has really done anything for them, y’know? As-is, if he has his memories back now nobody will ever even know he lost them. That said, if he and Emilia both get Subaru’s memories back I’d by fine with it because it would be kinda funny.

Honestly better without the second panel. No need to explain the joke.

I think your best bet would be Witch Hat Atelier. It has those wonderful fantasy vibes, and probably the best art I’ve ever seen in a manga.

I’m verrrry slowly re-watching ZZ Gundam with my wife (her first time, my second). We’re also watching a million other things so it’ll probably be a year or two before we finish, if we don’t just give up after a while and skip to CCA.

She might genuinely be angry, but tbf she’s had about 30 seconds to think about this and also hasn’t spoken with anyone about it. My guess is she’ll talk with Koyun about it next episode, which will in turn set off Koyun’s insecurities about her own feelings.

Perhaps, but it’s clear that the Tairas are bringing the nation down the path of destruction regardless.